Echoes
by Renegade87
Summary: Six months later and he would have thought the echoes of Dean would have faded by now.


Title: Echoes

**Title**: Echoes  
**Author**: Montecarlogurl87  
**Chapters**: 1  
**Rating**: umm, PG...I guess  
**Warnings**: angstola  
**Spoilers**: post AHBL...post Dean's deal  
**Feedback**: oh hell yea!  
**Disclaimer**: I do not own Dean or Sam :damnit: or anything else from the Supernatural universe.  
**Author's Note**: My brother left a thing of chapstick on my stereo, which I just noticed about two days ago...that somehow morphed into this...not sure it came out how I wanted it to, but I seriously typed it out all of like 15mins ago...so oh well

--

In the end there wasn't anything he could do.

Ruby told him as much, yelling at him that Dean already knew, but Sam steadfastly refused to believe.

In the end they were the ones that were right.

--

He spent a week half-dead and dehydrated in the small guest room at Bobby's. One week of crying himself to sleep just to wake up and do it all over again. One week with the dresser pushed in front of the door so Bobby couldn't get in.

He meant well, but Sam couldn't care less.

One week until Bobby took a sledge hammer to the door and threatened to do the same to Sam's skull.

--

He took every demon case he could.

In the beginning he doesn't even think he knew why.

But one, eyes coal black, in the middle of Oklahoma spit out some trash about Dean, nothing worth value, just a spray of salt into Sam's wounds and he put a bullet between his eyes.

After that he stopped answering Bobby's calls.

--

Days were spent tracking down every demonic sign, signal or glimmer he could find. Days spent driving cross country, the Impala with a gaping wound where Dean _should_ have been, days spent blaring the music, _Dean's music_, so loud he could hear the baseline even after the car had died.

Nights were spent trapping and torturing every possessed soul he could find. In the beginning it was hard, drawing out the exorcisms, knowing full well the human shell of a body could only take so much. But after a while the echo of the screams in his head died down.

Or maybe they just blended in with his own, he couldn't really tell anymore.

Either way it got easier, the Latin became ingrained, the questions rehearsed.

"When did you get out of Hell?"

"Do you know who I am? Who my brother is?"

"Do you know where he is?

"Can you find out?"

He made promises of freedom, quickly broke them when the desired answer wasn't given and broke more bodies in three months than he ever had in a lifetime with Dean by his side.

Six months after and he was ready to do anything.

He met one who knew of Dean. Who had just clawed his way out. Knew someone he could talk to.

And this time he kept his promise.

Let the demon have the body, human be damned, as long as he brought back _something_ about Dean.

The demon sneered, eyes oil slick black, and faded back into the night.

--

Sam didn't know where he was driving, foot as far as it could go, the Impala's engine screaming into the dark, bouncing off the walls of trees and stretches of open blacktop.

All he could hear was Dean yelling at him for letting the demon go. Telling him he knew better, that his job, the _family_ job was to save people, not sacrifice them for a lost cause.

Sam turned the music up louder, a bad habit both of them had gotten into when they had been in fights.

But Dean's voice in his head just rose. Asking him how he could be so cold, asking what it was he did wrong raising him to result in this.

It just kept getting louder and louder, bouncing around the inside of his skull, bouncing around the inside of the Impala. It was so real Sam would have bet all the money in his pocket that Dean was _right there_, eyes flaming green, screaming in his face.

His foot hit the brake, sending the car into a sliding curve of a stop, ending up in the dead center of a crossroads that Sam had been so out of it to even notice he had been headed for.

As the car jerked and groaned as the momentum of close to two tons of pure Detroit steel caught up with it something hit the back of Sam's foot.

Shaking he put the car in park and leaned down, blindly feeling the floorboard before his fingers hit cold steel.

The curve of the metal caught the light of the moon as he brought it out from underneath his feet. Smooth sweep of sharpened silver that had been given to him on his eighteenth birthday by Dean, right before Sam had told him he was leaving.

The only weapon he had taken with him to Stanford.

The same one he thought was lost there when Jessica was killed.

The night Dean pulled him from the fire, for the second time in his life.

Six months later and he would have thought the echoes of Dean would have faded by now.

But they never really do.


End file.
